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So it happened. I fell in love with this James Turrell Skyscape. It bothered me that I hadn’t on first sight this August. In the summer with clear skies there was just the square ‘hole’ (I feel I need to clarify this is a square hole as I always think of holes as being round) in the roof but it felt less visceral, less connected to environment than Turrell’s Skyscapes that are open to the elements and I found the experience disappointing. But this weekend, I understood why there was glass over it - with the gloomy grey clouded Dutch sky (which apparently is more the norm here than bright blue skies in Winter) there is little point in looking at the sky so Turrell turns the lights on and you can sit and experience colours change imperceptibly and yet utterly clearly all at same time. One of life’s paradoxical moments. There are many lessons for me here. That change is often slow and goes relatively unnoticed when you are in it - but if you look back a lot more might have changed than you felt at the time. A lesson too perhaps, a reminder, that sometimes what counts is how someone is when times are grey and meh and well, cloudy for you. We can all show up and shine and dazzle in the sunlight yes? But perhaps what counts is how we are when the going gets tough? Do we add colour then? Do we shine light into the dark corners for our friends and loved ones? Are we there in the dark for each other when it counts?

I’m so grateful to my clients for my reviews. Of course my ego gets a stroke, I get to show off about it on Instagram (more strokes) but it’s also a lovely moment for me to sit and have a little quiet think back to maybe where the relationship started, what we did and where we got to. I think I must have worked with this client for at least a couple of years. And as I sit here, I think about how lucky I am. You see, being an art consultant isn’t just about finding art and banging it up on the wall (at least it isn’t the way I do it). I believe to find art you really love takes time and patience. This client and I started by finding spots for her existing art in her beautiful Georgian home (that she turned from dereliction into one of the most cosy and enveloping homes I’ve ever been in), shipped, moved and hung a beautiful and delicate Japanese screen, got some works reframed and only then started to find works for some empty spaces. The art hang, much like her house, was created bit by bit, piece by piece. It’s a more authentic reflection of her and her family and it’s been a honour to work with such a wonderful family and watch her create such a beautiful home - literally from the ground up. I helped with a teeny tiny bit but it’s been enormously creatively rewarding. I love my job. If you would like some help with your art a two hour consultation or ten ideas for a space costs £175 plus VAT. I love my job. Ps kids - see!!!! “Unfailing good humour” I keep telling you I do. Now do you believe me? 😂😂😂😂

Gallery dinners force you to sit with work and experience it as you would at home, with distractions, chaos and (if you are lucky) good food and laughter. Your entire experience of the work changes. And whilst I liked this work when I first saw it, by the time I had sat opposite it, walked past it a few times, thought about it, glanced, looked hard, seen it out of the corner of my eye, felt it there, internalised it - you know - all the things we do with the works that are on our walls - I utterly loved it. The black borders transformed from borders into a kind of Deep Space giving a surreal sci-fi feel to the work. And that Shelf - the wood, the knots and tones - well it’s no wonder Hynek leave a nice bit of space between the other elements - it’s so we can gaze lovingly at Shelf. It moves as you walk past it - go and have a go. Then tear your eyes away and start to get your chops around Crab, Octopus and Fish. Suddenly notice that the painting is actually full of colour - red, white and blue. And then let your brain have lots of fun trying to working out the relationships between C, O and F. C is somehow slightly cheeky, I’m sure I see a twinkle in his crabby eye, coming up over that shelf with unknown intent. And then I turn to look at O. Oh. Gulp. He was hiding in plain sight in the middle of the canvas. They feature a lot in Hyneks work. Always the support act to bigger character. But lingering, waiting to be noticed. We had a very good chat about these Octopi and what they represent. Hynek said when he first started painting them he saw them as slightly threatening but his relationship with them has entirely changed over the years. He sees them now as keepers of the space, as clever, good creatures, waiting often in the wings to aid or help. And I thought that is paralleled in life. Lots of things are not what they first seem. And sometimes it takes years to change how you look at something. Sometimes who we thought was the baddie was actually the goodie and the goodie well, they were actually really quite terribly bad. And that double plated bellied Fish? More questions than answers. Love.

Sometimes, just sometimes a painting just, well, it floors you. And this one ‘Miffy, 2021’ by @liuyeart did just that. And sometimes, just sometimes, when a painting does that you think ‘Why?!’ And the shortly after you think ‘ok let’s forget why and just accept you’ve been knocked to the floor by something screwed to the wall and no bigger than your handbag’ but, ‘HOW?!’. So you look closer into the work, peering closer and closer but feeling more and more emotionally discombobulated by the work, looking for clues. Are there special brushstrokes, hundreds of layers of colours, amazing shading, highlights? Maybe a secret? And you look deep into the little painting that is now having a kind of magnetising power over you and you conclude. “After over 15 years of looking at thousands of paintings I know as little now as I did when I first started” You know nothing Louisa. Ziltch. Nada. Bugger. All. How utterly disheartening”. And then you remind yourself, soothe yourself, with the thought - no - what you have learned is that some paintings are imbued with something - maybe the energy and the magic of the artists soul (well that’s your best guess along with it being somehow compositionally perfect) and you HAVE learned to recognise that at a 1000 paces. That is what 15 years of looking has given you. And so this little Miffy, painted during lockdown maybe it IS imbued with a sadness, a loneliness, trapped in its tightly cropped frame, with shadows coming at it (is Miffy a she:it:them - answers on a postcard please) from every angle. And maybe, just maybe that painting took on the energy that the artist felt when they painted it. And maybe it’s that you are responding to. So maybe fifteen years of looking has taught you something. That, thanks to works like this, it has taught you how to feel. I love my job.

I’ve been meaning to post this project on here for some time and just bumping into the client has reminded me! This project is, for me, a reminder and a reassurance that finding great art for your home is not a box ticking exercise. Sometimes we find the perfect thing immediately and it all seems easy. But some spaces need more time , we can look at sometimes 100s of things and nothing feels right. But it doesn’t mean I’ve given up or the client has. We are just waiting for the right one to come along. And this is what happened here - we had looked a few things and nothing was quite perfect. And then I saw this at a show I was working at and thought - bingo!!! Call client, client comes and looks and falls in love. And that’s what I want for every piece we source for your home. It’s a high bar and sometimes finding The One takes some time. But we all know that right? Never. Give. Up.

‘Imponderabilia’. Indeed it is. This performance piece is, for me, the highlight of the Marina Abramovic show at the RA. I went twice in two days and I am expecting to return several times more with friends and clients over the forth coming weeks - I am going to be interested to observe if my reaction to this work changes or evolves. Because right now it is one of mostly being terrified. “Where do I look?” “Should I try not to touch his willy or her tits?” “What happens if I inadvertently touch his willy and it excites him?” (OK I realise this might be a stretch now from this 50 year old woman but I still feel 24 remember 😂 ) “What if I touch his willy and it excites ME?” “Or worse, her tits?! “Do they excite each other when they stare into each others eyes?” “Do they ever fall in love” “Do I face her or him?” “What does that say about me?” “Should I look into their eyes as I squeeze through?” “Why am I doing this?” “Is this even right or appropriate?” “What if I have bad breath?” So to the event itself - well both times I was laughable. In squeezing through and trying to touch neither willy nor tits, both times I kind of stuff up my weight distribution and end up in a kind of stuck, locked, straddle position between both touching, ironically, both willy and tits for what seemed like a lifetime. My left leg is forward (I decide to face the woman) but all my weight is on my back right leg and I don’t have the momentum to move either. LOL. So after an awkward pause I kind of lurch through more with sheer willpower than any kind of athletic grace. The first time I worry I’ve scratched the girl’s tummy with my finger nail whilst trying to not scrape her with my handbag. And the second time her nose manages to get stuck in my ear (yes right in 😂) and we share this odd moment of breathy nasal breathing into that orifice. Most strange, but oddly comforting. I remember thinking “Isn’t this what that woman did with those horses?” I cry the first time. And the second I want to but manage to keep it in. ‘Imponderabilia’ by Marina Abravomic. Indeed. Indeed. Go see and feel. ❤️

Thanks to the kind invites from a couple of galleries to the opening of @friezeofficial sculpture on Tuesday night I had the joy of listening to the poet laureate of Lambeth @abstractbenna perform his poem ‘In Memory of Hopping’ as part of @jyll.bradley installation ‘The Hop’. As you can tell from this rather crumpled copy I have been carrying it around in my bag and have been dipping in and out of the poem over the last few days. I’m sure in some ways it’s a very nostalgic view of the golden olden days, but there is something about the lines in the middle verse ‘as a working holiday it put the fun in funds’ that somehow stopped me in my tracks. It brought back the memories of the days when I picked apples in New Zealand. Happy, simple and joyous times. Waking up in the morning and cycling to the orchard as the sun rose. And picking the first apple off the tree, cold, crisp and covered with dew. And the bright clear Alexandra sky. And the people I picked with. Some a little itinerant. Some, I now realise, on a journey to finding themselves, some running away. Some picking to survive financially and others for some pocket money. But they were, we were, all hard grafters. And boy did we laugh over a cold beer at the end of a long day. I miss those simple days in many ways.

Spot the difference was always one of my favourite games in those 1970’s puzzle books. And so here is my version. The first photo was sent to me by my client and I asked her to send me one with none of the bits and bobs in it. After sitting with the two versions for a while I’ve decided I much prefer the one with the chair, the bag, the pair of socks and what looks to me suspiciously like a mouth guard holder 😂. Why? Because this photo was sent about a day after this work was installed and it already looked like it was part of the furniture, like it had been there for years and was loved like an old friend. It looked like it had already settled in. I source art that people love for real people’s homes, with real people’s lives, with real people’s stuff and socks and everything more besides. Sure, I have clients who have a few quid and I have clients who have less. But they all have homes that they love and live in and leave socks hanging around in and want to find art that they love for it. A two hour consultation for your home or 10 ideas for a space costs £175 plus VAT.

First day of term. First day of work. The end of the summer holidays. The end of my summer of love, a big birthday and a breath (that felt more like a lobotomy towards the end) between jobs. The beginning of Autumn. The run up to Christmas. Another chapter. A turning over of a new leaf. A few in fact (at least 3 kilos worth I hope 😂) And so as I sit here and think about today, my first day at school (well a new job actually but the feeling is the same) I think about the passing of time. I think about how two out of three of my kids do not have their first day of school and I wonder where did that time go? I feel enormously grateful that I only have to get myself out of the door this morning but also absolutely devastated somehow that those years have gone. I can’t look at the photos of them on their first day at school on doorstep of this house without wanting to sob. I find the passing of time terrifying at the moment. Truly terrifying. Hopefully an ironic function of having had too much of it on my, ahem, hands. I’m hoping it’s just a stage, that by 5pm today that moment will have passed. I found Maarten Baas’s ‘Sweeper Clock’ @museumvoorlinden last week didn’t help. It just absolutely bundled up all my fears, all my terrors into one charming and sweet and oddly meditative video of two road sweepers just sweeping their pile of rubble round, one minute at a time. Is my life rubble? Is everyone’s? As I said. Terrifying.

What a joy The Hague turned out to be - offering up not one but two James Turrell works. The sky scape @museumvoorlinden didn’t move me as much as the two outdoor ones I have previously experienced but the Celestial Vault in the dunes in Kijkduin did once I’d worked out how to lie on the bench (note to anyone going to visit - you lie with your head at the lower end of the bench not like we did for the first 20 mins wondering what all the fuss was about and saying “arrrgh we are a few inches too high to see it properly” 🫣). A wonderful end to a summer in which I’ve had a proper rest and now am ready to hit the ground running again. I feel truly blessed to have spent the summer with people I love. Now it’s back to some routine, the gym and my clients. Here we go 💪

I’m very happy to pop back up here on instagram to announce that my social media detox has given birth to my long overdue CSR pledges. There are three of them (go to website link in bio and page ‘Three Ways I Pledge to Give Back’ if you’d like to know more). Whilst art is fun and wonderful it is not without its impacts and I have wanted to do my bit for sometime to try and offset them. The first pledge I would like to talk about is ‘One Client One Tree’ - this is where I will be donating one tree to be planted in the Amazon for every client that engages my services. More trees will donated if we place some works in your home. To kick this off and as a thank you to my lovely clients who have already supported me and my business to date, today I donated 1000 trees to be planted in the Amazon. I’ve chosen @onetreeplanted as the best people for this job - they have won several awards in their field and crucially work with local communities to ensure the trees they plant get established. I’m popping back down now for the rest of the month - back again in September when I will talk about my other two pledges then.

I am delighted to say I am now hanging up my Instagram boots for the summer and I will be enforcing on myself a much needed digital detox. Whilst I’ve not been working in my PA job for the last month I’ve realised I am not quite bouncing back quite as quickly as I expected. Either the degree shows this year really were mostly a pile of shite or I’m tired and jaded. In the spirit of giving the art world the benefit of the doubt I’m going to blame it on me and say I’m just too tired. I can’t thank everyone enough for their business and support this year - I’m truly grateful - but am creatively drained and at risk of losing my art mojo. I’m taking the next month to rest my eye, celebrate a big birthday with friends and my family and yes, as you can see, do some lovely walks in one of my favourite places - the Isle of Wight. @wildernesshq here all 12 of us come. What a joyous blessing. See on the other side.

Art Hanging Advice

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For any art help please do get in touch:

Louisa: +44 (0)7855 803509 louisa@louisawarfieldart.com

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